Bounce or Exit Rate: The percentage of people leave who your website from a particular page. They may or may not have completed any actions (or visited other web pages. Bounce rate is sometimes interchanged with Single Access Rate).
Single Access Rate: The percentage of people who visited a particular page and left from that same page and did not complete any actions. This is most useful when looking at campaign landing pages or your home page.
Click Through Rate: Usually used with ad campaigns, a statistic that helps identify the number of people who clicked on a particular link, divided by the number of people who saw it. For ads, it’s usually clicks on the ad or link, divided by the number of impressions (or eyeballs). It can also be used on a page to determine the number of people who clicked on links on a particular page divided by the number of total page views of that page. Can be confused or often interchanged with conversion rate.
Conversion Rate: The number of people who completed a desired action based on the total potential audience that could take such an action. For example, if you had 100 people come to your homepage where you really wanted them to register for your newsletter, and 10 people did, your conversion rate would be 10 per cent. This metric often gets confused with click through rate or can be interchanged. In my honest opinion, a conversion rate has to do with actions, or task completion, not just clicking on a link on your campaign landing page. However, if you don’t have a newsletter, or perhaps your product is not one people can buy online, this is where many people may use clicks on a specific link also as their conversion rate.
What you might consider in that case is a specific path or journey that you want visitors to take. Ideally, you want them to visit more than one page on your site. Using a path analysis report, you can input the pages that you want people to visit and you will be able to know how many people took that specific journey. To get your conversion rate in this instance, you take the total number of people who took that journey and divide it by the number of people who viewed the page where your journey would start.
Are there any specific metrics that you’re not too sure how they are collected, what they showcase or when best to use them? Let me know and I’ll be happy to explain them as best I can.
Photo Credit: scataudo; sxc.hu
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available